Education commissioner removes EPISD school board

Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams announced Thursday he's stripping all power from El Paso Independent School District trustees, citing a lack of trust from the community they represent. (Ruben R. Ramirez / El Paso Times)

Click photo to enlarge

Board of managers (clockwise from top left): Ed Archuleta, retiring president and CEO of the El Paso Water Utilities' Public Service Board; Judy Castleberry, state monitor for Texas Education Agency; Carmen Arrieta-Candelaria, the chief financial officer for the city of El Pasol; outgoing Republican state Rep. Dee Margo.

Dissolving the authority of El Paso Independent School District trustees and installing a new board of managers provided Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams with a stern message Thursday for administrators and educators trying to game the federal accountability system:

"We're not going to allow cheating in this state."

Williams delivered his warning after announcing plans to strip all power from the beleaguered El Paso ISD school board, which allowed a cheating scheme to flourish under a superintendent now serving time in federal prison, and failed to fix the district that still must search for dozens of students it once cast out.

Advertisement

In the end, Williams said, the community no longer trusts the seven trustees, who were elected to oversee the city's largest school district. In a news conference at the Region 19 Education Service Center in Central El Paso, he said his decision to replace the elected board with an appointed board of managers should serve as a warning to school districts across the state that his Texas Education Agency administration will not tolerate schemes that create an uneven playing field for children.

"Moms and dads want to know truly how their youngsters are performing," Wil liams said. "Taxpayers want to know that they're getting the bang for their buck, and kids really want to know how do I compare to the youngster sitting next to me. And they can't get to that answer if we've got cheating."

Williams said he hopes the state's 1,200 public school districts and charter schools learn two lessons from his decision to appoint a board of managers, which made the 64,000-student EPISD the largest school district in the state's history to face such a severe sanction.

"If you cheat, we'll eventually find out, and if we find out, we're going to take strong action as a consequence of it," Williams said.

Video by Ruben R. Ramirez / El Paso Times

Video by Aaron Bracamontes / El Paso Times

The announcement drew the ire of some school board members who said they have worked to fulfill all of the demands that the state agency had placed on them, including hiring an external auditor to determine why the cheating scheme went unchecked and commencing an investigation to weed out employees who collaborated with former Superintendent Lorenzo García to deny children a proper education.

"During this difficult time for our district, the board has been unified to implement the necessary reforms and the necessary steps to move our district forward," board President Isela Castañon-Williams said in a statement. "I hope the EPISD community and the public will recognize that all trustees have always had the best interests of our students, teachers, parents, and constituents at heart."

EPISD trustees have said that the cheating scheme that pushed some students out of school, prevented some from enrolling and kept others in ninth grade even if they had enough credits to be classified as sophomores, was so elaborate that they had no way of knowing García was gaming the federal accountability system.

However, the district's internal auditor had found evidence of cheating at Bowie High School in the summer of 2010. The El Paso Times obtained that evidence earlier this year through the state's Public Information Act. But trustees had delegated much of their power to García, allowing the internal auditor to report to the superintendent and giving him sole discretion to hire and fire employees all the way up to associate superintendents.

García is now serving a 3å-year federal prison term after pleading guilty in June to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud for steering a $450,000 no-bid contract to his girlfriend and scheming with at least six unnamed co-conspirators to manipulate the federal accountability system.

Board of managers

Williams spoke Wednesday in Austin with the El Paso Times, the day before he came to El Paso to announce his decision to remove the board.

Williams, a former elected official, said he struggled with the decision to replace a school board chosen by voters with a state-appointed board of managers. But he believes that the community's distrust for the trustees would not allow the district to move forward.

"I gave the board time and, during the time that I gave them, they did certain things that one would have wanted them to do," Williams said about steps the EPISD has taken against a handful of employees thought to be part of the cheating scheme. "It is my judgment, however, that it's not enough, and it is my further judgment that there is not much more that they could do that's big enough to restore a sense of confidence."

The EPISD board will continue to have some powers for several weeks because the federal Voting Rights Act requires the state to receive U.S. Justice Department approval for replacing an elected board.

Interim Superintendent Vernon Butler said he learned he would maintain his position at the school district just hours before Williams made the announcement that he was stripping the school board's powers.

"I refer to El Paso as the largest little city in the state," Butler said. "Things were already out, I think, before the commissioner was even on a plane to El Paso. The commissioner has a job to do, a responsibility in the state of Texas and, of course, to our school district and our city. I respect that, and we certainly, as part of the El Paso Independent School District, will be working very closely with him and with our current board until that change takes place."

Judy Castleberry, who already monitors the district for the Texas Education Agency, will immediately become what the state refers to as a conservator. Castleberry will essentially run the school district and will have the power to overrule the district's interim superintendent and the school board.

Castleberry, who will continue in that role until the federal government approves the appointment of the selected board of managers, could not be reached for comment.

Williams' appointees to the board of managers include Castleberry; Ed Archuleta, who is the retiring president and CEO of the El Paso Water Utilities' Public Service Board; Carmen Arrieta-Candelaria, the chief financial officer for the city of El Paso; and outgoing Republican state Rep. Dee Margo.

The education commissioner said he has asked state Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso, to give him the names of potential candidates for the last slot on the board of managers.

Rodríguez said he is working on gathering those names but did not feel comfortable disclosing them. Earlier this year, Rodríguez advocated that school trustees be given sufficient time to mend the district, but he said the need for action by Williams soon became necessary.

"I agree with him that the public trust and confidence has simply not been restored in the district, and that has not happened because the district has essentially dragged its feet for months and months to address the critical issues that need to be addressed," Rodríguez said.

Reaction to decision

Trustee Alfredo Borrego said the school board was not allotted enough time to turn things around. Borrego said he "totally disagreed" that the school board needed to be removed in order for the community to start regaining trust in the school district.

"If there was no trust in me in the district I represent, I would have resigned a long time ago," said Borrego, who believes Williams' decision was politically motivated. "Everywhere I go, people tell me I'm doing a good job."

On the other hand, Williams received instant praise from lawmakers, former school district employees and community leaders who said the school board had not owned up to its responsibility and had not done enough to mitigate the damage caused by García and his accomplices.

"It's about time," said former El Paso High School Principal John Roskosky, who along with other principals has offered detailed accounts of being retaliated against for refusing to participate in the cheating scheme.

"I'm sorry it came to this," Roskosky said. "I wish they would have stepped up like they should have and resigned themselves, but they didn't. This is a big decision on his part, but I'm glad he went ahead and did it."

Finding fault

Williams said state law gives him the power to select a new superintendent and to name the chairman of the board of managers, but he plans to leave both tasks to the new board, which probably will not begin its work until after the start of the new year.

"What I want to do, number one, is to restore a sense of confidence and trust," Williams said in his interview with the Times. "Number two, I want them to go out and hire the best superintendent they can find, and number three, I want them to figure out if there are other wrongdoers in that district and I want it done in a hurry."

The appointed board can serve for up to two years. Williams will decide when the board of managers will wrap up its work. That means the candidates who run for school board seats in 2013 may not be able to immediately assume their positions if they win office.

Castañon-Williams said the state agency is ignoring its own mistakes while it punishes the district for its failures.

Two years ago, García railed against then-state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh's allegation that the district was "disappearing" low-performing students in order to boost performance on state and federal accountability measures. Among the tools he used to dismiss Shapleigh's allegations were two audits by the Texas Education Agency that cleared the district of wrongdoing.

"While there has been considerable criticism of the trustees for failing to catch Dr. García's actions earlier, two audits by TEA in 2010 found no wrong doing in the district," Castañon-Williams said in a statement. "As trustees, we relied on those findings at the time."

The El Paso Times began detailing the scheme in April 2012 after winning a months-long battle that sought documents from the school district. It was not until then that district officials conceded there had been wrongdoing.

State Rep. Joe Pickett, D-El Paso, said he also believes the TEA is playing defense because it failed to catch the districtwide cheating scheme. He said that while Williams was not head of the agency during the lapses, he is now under pressure to correct mistakes.

But Pickett said the decision to replace the school board with a board of managers is still a positive move for the community.

"It looks like there needs to be some changes both ways, but I think there needs to be closure and I know that this is not closure in some respects. It's just beginning, but I think it is a closure," Pickett said. "I think it's a closure of where we have been up to this point."

Pickett said, "We just need to start from scratch, so let's do it."

Last week, Williams, who took the helm of the state agency in September, requested that the state auditor conduct an inquiry into how the TEA investigated the EPISD in 2010. The state auditor said his agency couldn't perform such an investigation until fiscal year 2014, but TEA officials said they would probably seek another independent investigator to perform the inquiry sooner.

State Rep. Marisa Marquez, D-El Paso, said she is happy the new commissioner is looking into the state agency's failures. But Marquez said a more pressing issue is restoring the community's confidence in its school district, something she said would not happen if the school board remained in place.

"I don't think that they were able to repair the damage that had been done, and they didn't make any earnest efforts in the past two years to really come out and be transparent about the process," Marquez said.

Moving forward

The appointed board of managers will assume all of the powers and duties of a school board, including having public meetings.

But their takeover may still be months away.

Texas is subject to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which seeks to prevent the disenfranchisement of minority voters in states with a history of discrimination. Under the act, the Texas Education Agency must submit the plan to the U.S. Department of Justice for approval.

Williams said the federal government has "been pretty good" about clearing the appointment of a board of managers in the past as the state sought to remedy years of dysfunction and mismanagement in some smaller Texas school districts.

The latest case was in 2008, when the TEA announced that it would appoint a three-member board of managers and a new superintendent in the 7,500-student North Forest Independent School District near Houston. The district had nearly $12 million in debt that school year, was haunted by years of low academic performance and had a school board that promoted instability.

The state agency also replaced school boards in the Wilmer-Hutchins Independent School District in 2005 and in Kendleton ISD near Houston, in the early 1990s. The state later shut down Wilmer-Hutchins ISD in Dallas.

State officials do not plan to shutter EPISD, but they do believe that a board of managers will better prepare the school district to emerge from a cheating scandal, which targeted students who were projected to be low-performers.

Through the scheme, García and his accomplices reduced the pool of 10th-grade students taking the state's standardized test, which helps determine whether districts and campuses meet federal accountability standards.

School board trustees for months said they did not plan to pursue their own investigation into wrongdoing at the district and would wait for the results of the investigation into the cheating by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Education before taking disciplinary action.

Trustee David Dodge in October said the FBI kept the district from conducting its own investigation and only gave EPISD leaders the go-ahead after the Texas Education Agency called on the district to fire several employees. Representatives for the FBI said they never prevented EPISD from investigating or enforcing misconduct that violated district policies.

Since then, three employees tied to the cheating scheme have resigned from the district, two are on paid administrative leave, and one has retired.

Johnnie Vega, a former assistant principal at Bowie High, was one of those employees who resigned. Vega, who publicly admitted that he feared for his job and followed orders to remove some low-performing students, said he was "thrilled to death" by Williams' decision.

Vega said he hopes the new board of managers will take a look at all the administrators who were complicit in the cheating scheme and still remain at the district.

"EPISD wouldn't have had these scandals if the board wasn't asleep," Vega said. "I one time wanted to go to the board and tell the board what was happening at Bowie, but I knew that it was political suicide. But hell, by me not doing it, it was political suicide anyway."

Borrego, the trustee, expressed disappointment that he did not hear directly from Commissioner Williams about the decision. He said he's considering not showing up for future school board meetings.

"I'm being replaced, so why should I go to the board meetings?" Borrego said. "What's the point? Or should I keep being a trustee knowing fully in a few weeks I won't be a trustee, so I'm having those issues. I think I need to sleep on this tonight."

Zahira Torres may be reached at ztorres@elpasotimes.com; 512-479-6606.